Review: In the Name of the Family, by Sarah Dunant
Random House, 2017. 429 pp. $28

The best fiction portrays larger-than-life characters as real people, and you couldn’t ask for larger figures than the Borgia clan. Here, the sequel to Blood and Beauty, Dunant gives us a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century pope who raises corruption to a high art, even for the papacy, and two of his infamous, illegitimate children. Cesare’s a murderous, charismatic military genius of absolutely no scruple who terrorizes half of Italy. He also has, shall we say, deeper than brotherly feelings toward his beautiful, younger sister, Lucrezia, whose marriages he arranges and whose husbands he disposes of according to whim.

What Dunant does with these remarkable figures–and, by the way, throw in Niccolò Machiavelli, Florence’s envoy to Cesare–is itself extraordinary. I won’t say she makes Cesare sympathetic, which would be asking too much. He’s not the only politician who can wield a knife blade, either himself or by proxy, yet Dunant makes no excuses for his particular brand of viciousness. But she does show his passionate attachment to his sister (the incestuous current largely omitted in this book, oddly enough), and his attempts to end brigandage and corrupt taxation. He even earns the loyalty of certain people, at least those not related to the bodies dumped in the nearest river. Likewise, though his father, Pope Alexander VI, is the definition of venality, he also loves his children deeply, as well as the courtesans who bore them. So he’s a real person too, with a sense of humor, a cheerful outlook, and more avarice than most, but again, not alone, there.

However, Lucrezia holds the center. Only twenty-two but on her third husband, the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara, she’s well aware that she lives in a house of cards. Her presence in Ferrara pacifies the powerful Este family and keeps them grudging allies of the Borgias; the immense dowry she brought doesn’t hurt, either. But her aging father-in-law, the current duke, makes no secret of his disdain for her, and should she fail to produce an heir, the only thing standing between her and a sorry end is Cesare’s army. And Cesare, though he seems never to lose a battle, is dying a slow, miserable death from “the French pox,” also known as syphilis.

Dunant excels at small moments, and she renders her characters’ inner lives with a sure hand, no mean feat when they’re historical personages whose psychology may or may not emerge in sketchy contemporary sources. Take, for example, Lucrezia’s first official meeting with her husband-to-be, Alfonso, who unfortunately shares a name with her predecessor, the one she truly loved:

Noblewomen are early connoisseurs in the art of the courtly kiss, and over these last weeks Lucrezia has been gobbled and pecked, dribbled on and stubble-scraped, has even felt the nibble of teeth and odd teasing flash of a tongue. But this, this, she thinks, is more like a wet dog flopping down onto a hearth. As he [Alfonso] lifts his head, she takes in a lungful of sweat and leather. If perfume has been applied, it is long lost in the dust between here and Ferrara.

Dunant intends to show not only that Lucrezia’s a pawn in the Borgia’s power game, but how all women of that time are invisible except as sex objects. It’s not just that men succeed in labeling women as temptresses, the embodiment of sin, the weaker vessel, and all that. It’s that women are unworthy of serious notice, so that, for instance, medicine hasn’t bothered to study whether men can transmit the French pox to women, and what happens when they do. Or, on a more intimate level, Alfonso and Lucrezia feel strain in one another’s company, yet he sees no reason to learn how to talk to her. Even Machiavelli, who lives to talk politics and history, refuses to do so with his wife, Marietta, whose only legitimate role is to endure his long absences and infidelities.

All this is excellent, sometimes brilliant, even, and always interesting. Yet In the Name of the Family doesn’t quite hold together for me. The narrative depends on episodes, many of which could drop out of the book and leave the plot unchanged. Nothing that Macchiavelli does or says, really matters, for instance. Each episode may keep the pages turning, but they don’t always feel connected, except by chronology, so there’s no crescendo of tension, no climax. The end just peters out.

To an extent, Dunant has little choice, because history doesn’t cooperate with timely cataclysms, and, to her resounding credit, she’s faithful to history. Nevertheless, reading In the Name of the Family sometimes feels like fictionalized history rather than a novel. I still recommend it; I think it deserves wide readership; but I liked Blood and Beauty more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Beatrice, a young woman from Verona, is walking her cousin’s estate in Sicily when she sees a Moor making love to a white woman who wears an identical wedding band to his. Though at first surprised that interracial marriage is even possible, Beatrice comes away wanting a husband too, especially one who’ll desire her so powerfully. As it happens, her uncle is about to play host to Spanish noblemen representing the power that rules Sicily; joining them are Benedick and Claudio, merchants’ sons from Padua and Florence, respectively. Beatrice and Benedick fall for each other on sight, while Claudio cozies up to her cousin, Hero.

According to legend, this balcony in Verona was where Juliet entranced Romeo (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, undated)

Readers familiar with Much Ado about Nothing will recognize this setup as backstory for Shakespeare’s comedy. Maybe you’ve also identified the passionate couple on the beach as Othello and Desdemona. And when you hear that Beatrice’s older brother is named Teobaldo (aka Tybalt), and that a feud between the Montecchi and Capuletti families is tearing apart Verona, you’ll know to keep an eye peeled for Romeo and Giulietta.

This bold contrivance promises a rollicking story and a bushel of grand themes: jealousy, the nature of love, the sexual double standard, how appearances deceive, split loyalties, and so forth. But Beatrice and Benedick falters from the get-go, and the narrative seldom rises above what feels ordained. It’s never easy to create tension in a well-known story, but Fiorato tries by adding plot rather than by deepening her characters. That’s a mistake.

The trouble begins with her premise, which supposes that Shakespeare was Sicilian. I might accept that notion for the two hours’ traffic of her stage if she portrayed him as a rising poet and dramatist, a charismatic figure caught up in his verse. But her ink-stained scribbler’s capacity for invention takes a distant third behind the terrible wrongs done him and his thirst for revenge. He claims the mantle of authorship solely by spouting words that have since become famous, which prompts either a wink-wink, nudge-nudge or uneasy laughter. Worse, Beatrice and Benedick quote random snippets from Guess Who and even pen sonnets from the same source. You too can write great literature in your spare time, without any practice at all!

This implausible conceit would matter a lot less if the characters, especially the men, amounted to more than a collection of attitudes, locked in place for an obvious purpose. Benedick, aside from his looks and ability with a rapier (how he learned is never adequately explained), has little to recommend him, and his pride, ideas about women, and approach to life seem handed to him rather than born from within. As the wheels turn, you sense that he’s got a long journey to make, and much ado about transforming himself, before the final drama with Beatrice takes place.

Moreover, for no good reason, he immediately embraces as great friend Don Pedro, a Spanish nobleman who wears villainy barely concealed below his charm. Yet it takes Benedick, supposedly a perceptive fellow, a very long time to get the message. Further, he does so while serving Don Pedro aboard ship in the Spanish Armada, a nod to the political theme. But the conflict between Don Pedro and Benedick could unfold anywhere, and burdening the narrative with yet another epic story–one with an inevitable ending–is too much. Maybe more to the point, Fiorato’s narrative seems to lose its moorings at sea, while it’s far more authoritative at the Spanish court, where, for example, King Philip II keeps a red-headed dwarf as a caricature of England’s Queen Elizabeth. What a fabulous scene, full of tension from unexpected undercurrents.

That leaves it up to Beatrice to save this hodgepodge, but she can’t. How she got to be so independent-minded, capable with a sword, or virtually oblivious of sex until watching Othello and Desdemona are only some of the questions I have. Her conversion to ardent feminism feels unnecessarily earnest, maybe because she doesn’t have that far to travel. Further, I’m not clear how a woman who holds feminist views (and knows how to defend herself physically) surrenders so meekly to her tyrannical father. One such surrender, however, provides what I think is the author’s best scene. Before male witnesses, a doctor brusquely examines Beatrice to prove her virginity so that a marriage contract may be drawn up. Nothing speaks more eloquently than this humiliating, abusive act, which needs no further commentary. I wish the rest of Beatrice and Benedick had shown the same directness and economy.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Review: Not All Bastards Are From Vienna, by Andrea Molesini
Grove/Atlantic, 2015. 348 pp. $26
Translated from the Italian by Anthony Shugaar and Patrick Creagh

If there’s such a thing as a thoroughly engaging novel about war–one that deals squarely with death, cruelty, injustice, and stupidity–this is it. It’s also easy to see why. Molesini’s characters live and die displaying forcefulness, ingenuity, weakness, strength, and, in many instances, mordant wit that keeps them sane. They feel at once larger than life yet wholly plausible and human, the ineffable secret of great fiction.

Some of the 265,000 Italian soldiers who surrendered at Caporetto in 1917. The figure was so high in part because many detested their commanding general, Luigi Cadorna (Courtesy Digital Library of Slovenia via Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

The story takes place in Refrontolo, thirty miles north of Venice, following the disastrous Italian defeat at Caporetto in late 1917, which permits Germans, then Austrians, to occupy the town and commandeer the villa belonging to the Spada family. The key figures are Grandma Nancy and Aunt Maria, genteel women sure of their place in the world, equally certain that it’s above the invaders’. If the matriarchs bow to the power of the men who plunder their home and burn its furniture to keep warm, it’s because the soldiers have weapons. However, as grandma starchily informs the Austrian commandant, that doesn’t mean they have authority.

Consequently, how the Spada family, its retainers, and the local priest, Don Lorenzo, treat their unwelcome guests (and one another) turns a typical wartime tale into a novel rich with explorations of evil, social class, love, youth, religion, and patriotism. Narrating this wide-ranging story is Paolo, the seventeen-year-old grandson/nephew of the matriarchs. His parents having died at sea, he’s an orphan, but he’s anything but moping. He doesn’t miss them, having never received any love or even closeness, and his relatives do their best to make up for it.

Paolo spends much time with his Grandpa Guglielmo, an armchair philosopher who always has something pithy to say (“war and loot are the only faithful married couple”), and who encourages his grandson’s keen interest in his surroundings. In fact, it’s interest, rather than engagement, that describes Paolo at the start, for he seems detached. He observes everything but often keeps his emotional distance, and I wonder why; maybe it’s the parents who never gave him warmth. Even in his pursuit of Giulia, a woman eight years his senior who turns many heads, Paolo seems more lustful than anything else.

However, among other things, the novel is his coming-of-age story, for as the war tightens its grip on Refrontolo and the Spada villa, he comes out of himself. He becomes closer to his grandfather, whom he tries to understand; gets involved in resistance activities; and begins to see the people around him in more complex ways. He’s also the receptive ear for his elders’ wisdom, as when his aunt–who’s trapped in her hopeless attraction for the Austrian commandant–says:

The vanquished cannot forgive the victors . . . even if no one ever knows who really wins and who loses, because what’s at stake, what’s really at stake, the things that no one ever talks about, are unknown. Life goes on . . . but you lose pieces of yourself along the way, every day.

There’s so much life to this book, even as it describes the ugliest things humans do to one another. The characters just won’t be denied. Everyone has his or her angles and corners, and no figure is too minor to pass by without a distinctive detail, as with the innkeeper whose hair, accent, and complexion bring him to life, even for the sentence or two in which he appears. No scene is too brief to go without proper attention to ambience, scenery, or impact, yet the narrative flies by rapidly. In lesser hands, this novel could be twice its length, but, as with the resourcefulness his characters must show, Molesini gets a long way on very little.

Two aspects of Not All Bastards Are from Vienna bother me. If Paolo is indeed meant to be withdrawn and self-contained in the beginning, and we’re meant to understand that his cold upbringing caused that, he changes rather quickly. It’s a pleasure to watch him mature, but I’m not sure I buy it. Secondly, the end feels a little contrived, but it’s not unjust, and I suppose few readers will mind.

A marvelous book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.